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Wow, wow, wow, that is all I can say. One of the best fishing trips of my life. We got to Wahweap marina late Thursday night, actually Friday morning. Accidentally slept in and wasn't on the water till almost 9 am. No problem at all, we caught our first striper trolling a shad rap on our way out of the stateline boat ramp. Fished for a few hours around lone rock and consistently caught stripers about one every 20 minutes or so on rat-L-traps and producers. Then we went on the long trek down through the narrows and up to Warm Creek bay. Tried fishing for small mouth bass and caught quite a few, but they were pretty small, 1-2 lbs. So, we went back toward Wahweap. Saturday morning we got out about 8AM and started trolling anchovies. This was the much better ticket! We caught our biggest striper of the trip, 9 lbs, right off the bat. We then caught a catfish and a 25", very fat walleye. From then on it was striper after striper. We had several doubles and were fighting to keep lines untangled while we both hauled them in. By 2pm we had two large coolers stuffed full, so we did catch & release for a while, then called it a trip and headed home.
We had the best action on the anchovies rigged JP style, but trolled on a downrigger at 40-45 feet and trolled super fast, 4-5 mph. Most of our success was actually straight across from the stateline ramp, near castle rock, where no one else seemed to want to try it. Great trip for someone who wants fast fishing, not much expertise involved! I do have a couple of pics of my wife holding the 9lber and a couple of the nicer stripers, I'll post them once I get them off the camera.
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Nice report! Makes me itch to get back out there to fight those stipers. Any surface action or boils yet?
The second I hear top water action is turned on I am all over heading down there.
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Congrats on the fun trip FH. Were all of those fish caught from the boat I just sold you? If so, I'm jealous!
Actually, I hope your success was from my old boat, because I sincerely hope you're enjoying it!
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Yep, PF, your boat is serving me just fine and dandy, got the fishfinder hooked up, mounted a trolling motor, got that 135 purring like a kitten, and added two downriggers, so far its been a whole lot of fun!! Thanks for selling it to me!
We did not see any striper boils, because we didn't get out early enough, but I have confirmed from some reliable sources that both mornings that we were there they were boiling in the backs of the canyons at first light.
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That's awesome! I've been hoping it has been running well for you.
Now the question remains, why didn't I have that kind of good luck when I had it out on the water and was huntin' for fishies?
Hmmnnn......
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Were you trolling the JP rigged anchovies 'super fast, 4 - 5 mph'? Or was that the speed for the shad raps and rattle traps? It seems that most people troll the JP rigged anchovies super slow (like 0.5 to 1.0 mph), which doesn't work well for me since the minimum speed on my boat (pulling two buckets) is 1.3 mph. If the JP rigs were working at the higher speeds, that is good news for me!
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That sounds like a very productive and fun trip! I'll bet all those stripers wore you out! I wish it wasn't such a long trip down....kinda pricey nowadays with gas prices sky high. Oh well. Thanks for the report.
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I usually love going to Powell but, The last time I was there was probably the worst fishing trip I ever had, LOL, But I still love the place! & will return LOL. Thanks for the great report glad You all had Good time getting into them.
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YES, we were trolling JP anchovies at 4 to 5 mph, usually right at 4, but very, very fast. It happened by accident, and my laziness. I wanted to move to a new spot and had one pole with a producer on and another rigged for an anchovie, I didn't want to take the time to switch the chovie to a lure, so I just threw it out, not expecting much. On our way to the new spot we got fish after fish after fish on the chovie trolled fast, nothing on the lure. That was clearly the fastest action we'd had all day, so I put both poles out with anchovies and we couldn't keep them off from then on.
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